The Iron Fit Training Schedule

Like many runners, signing up for races motivates me to keep ~~my day job so I don’t bankrupt the family~~ up with my training.

But lately, my training has been of the “feel like” and “how about” variety.

Today, I feel like biking for an hour. How about a four-mile run?

That’s not good, considering I have a half marathon in two weeks, where I hope to run a decent time, followed by a sprint triathlon the week after and, at the end of June, my first Olympic distance triathlon. For which I haven’t trained. So, to avoid the situation above, I’ve been searching for a decent triathlon training plan that I can follow, that would also (somewhat) accommodate my running schedule.

So far, I’ve found no such thing.

But I did read this book.

To be iron fit, who would’t want that?

Unlike books and online plans that tell you how to train for a half marathon or marathon, there are very, very few books dedicated to training for middle-distance triathlon. Not Triathlon Training For Dummies or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Triathlon Training, thank you very much. So I figure, I’ll take what’s available — Ironman training books abound, of course — and adjust.

Be Iron Fit has three 30-week training programs — Finish It, Intermediate and Competitive. Each starts with a 10-week base-building period, which I figure would be just the right amount of training for me. So, my first week (next week?) would look like this:Pretty much the only thing I understand here is the fact that we’re kicking things off with a rest day: love it already! But don’t worry, I’ll decipher and give you the details as I go.

In other news, my new Garmin arrived yesterday and I love it already.[The kid, too.]

I’ll show you the beautiful charts and stuff it produces soon!

So far this week:First bike ride with the Garmin. Not only is the GPS data flawless (no more skipping back and forth through neighbors’ houses!), but the auto-pause function worked perfectly. Extremely helpful to not have to pause/ re-start the tracker at each streetlight, or have this wait time mess up your data averages.

On Wednesday, I biked to the store and back (cycled some errands?):

Little did I know that my Garmin would arrive, and obviously would need to be tested right away. So that evening, I ran to the gym, swam a little (yes, it works in the water and measures all kinds of cool stuff!), then ran back:That was before I had set it up to automatic pause, so the waiting at red lights (4 minutes at one point on my way there!) is baked in. For the swim, I couldn’t start the watch for the first 400 yards, so I just tracked the final 1000.